Around 100 publishing folk gathered in London yesterday to hear the UK rendition of the Klopotek Digital Asset Distributor conference. It was certainly an informative day and all the DAD suppliers lined up in the beauty parade to give their 15 minutes of fame speech, as to why they were different from the pack.
As part of the parade it would be inappropriate for me to comment on the individual messages but the similarity and consistency of message was both scary for some and interesting for many.
What is a DAD? Well it’s a part new definition of the digital publishing life-cycle that encompasses; DAPs Digital Asset Producers – publishers to you and me, DADs Digital Asset Distributors – either publishers again or 3rd parties who distribute content, metadata (marketing and promotional stuff from bibliographic to the latest widget or blog) to DARs Digital asset retailers – anyone who sells stuff. We even had MUMs but that got too much and the meaning was lost on me.
Defining where one starts and another finishes is often down to consultants, salesmen and technologists. Whether you need three separate silos or just different views into the same silo is down to individual business needs. There is obviously the check it in and check it out editorial pre press development cycle, the archive and retrieval phase, the distribution of content and context and rights and finally the commerce. The question as to whether all DADs can support other areas is interesting and this blurring of boundaries is what makes putting labels on things often very difficult.
There were two interesting presentations from Abobe and Google and Google ‘Crawl’ certainly do what it says on the box!
But the event certainly raised the profile of the digital market offers and some of the issues we all face and congratulations must go to that dynamic duo of Mark Bide and Mike Shatzkin for pulling it together the timely and much needed research and to Klopotek for funding and supporting it.
